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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Yves Cortez, who recently passed away in May, was the author of a book (among others) that makes the assertion that French, Italian and other Romance languages do not come from Latin but rather that so-called Vulgar Latin was really just Italian as spoken at the time, and that Latin was the written language alone and a language that came from a slightly different branch of the Indo-European language tree. I wrote a post about his book last year in July.

Cortez' site is still up even after passing away, and there is a particularly interesting post here in response to a text given to show that Spanish does in fact come from classical Latin - he then takes a similar text and treats it in the same matter to show (for the sake of argument) that English therefore comes from French.

2
comments:

I don't quite understand why it's so hard to check if the assertion that they did not actually speak Classical Latin and just wrote it is true. I mean, come on, the language was spoken by half the continent and it evolved into a bunch of different languages and it must people possible to trace it back.

In the end, who cares. Language names are just a matter of definition. In some sense French and Italian and the other languages are still Latin. There wasn't one day when people woke up and said: "Hey, forget that Latin stuff: let's start speaking Italian".

I don't quite understand why it's so hard to check if the assertion that they did not actually speak Classical Latin and just wrote it is true. I mean, come on, the language was spoken by half the continent and it evolved into a bunch of different languages and it must people possible to trace it back.

In the end, who cares. Language names are just a matter of definition. In some sense French and Italian and the other languages are still Latin. There wasn't one day when people woke up and said: "Hey, forget that Latin stuff: let's start speaking Italian".